If We Do It Together
'Fog was never this heavy, was he?'
Granted, whenever I'd carried the Fog he'd always taken the form of a four-year-old, so comparing him to eight-year-old Han Haram wasn't exactly fair.
Still, I hadn't expected him to weigh this much.
"Jinbae-hyung."
I called out to Jinbae-hyung, keeping my expression as neutral as I could.
"...Ah, yes! Actor-nim."
Jinbae-hyung answered with a flustered look that was unlike him.
The people around us, who had been standing there dazed for who knows what reason, came back to their senses as well. Each of them busied themselves with their own tasks while still sneaking glances in my direction, and though I felt a little awkward about it, I got straight to the point.
"Would it be all right if Haram and I waited in the car for a bit?"
Something must have gotten on my face.
At the moment, though, my numb arms were the more pressing issue.
"Of course. Shall I carry him to the car for you?"
Jinbae-hyung asked, looking down at Han Haram in my arms.
I nearly nodded before I could stop myself.
Honestly, I wanted the help. Desperately.
But the moment Jinbae-hyung offered, Han Haram burrowed deeper into my chest. His grip on my arms tightened. Just stay still, please...
"No, thank you. Just open the car door for me."
With the kid clinging like that, I couldn't bear to hand him over, so I endured it.
And so I left the set with Han Haram still in my arms.
'Wow...'
I distinctly remembered parking close by.
'This is insane.'
Every single step was an ordeal. Just when my arms had gone so numb that sawing them off seemed like the more reasonable option, I finally reached the car. Jinbae-hyung sprang the door open quickly, and mercifully, my arms survived.
"I'll knock when the PD comes back. Take your time until then."
"Thank you."
I sank into the soft car seat and finally let my muscles go slack, thinking:
I will never underestimate an eight-year-old's weight again.
"You are seriously heavy."
"...Am I heavy?"
"Yep. You're gonna be tall when you grow up."
Completely unaware that my arms had nearly fallen off, Han Haram lay quietly in my embrace.
"Haram."
"Yeah?"
"You can relax now. It's just the two of us."
How long was he planning to stay glued to me like this?
I'd tried circling around it instead of flat-out telling him to get off, but apparently I'd been too subtle. Rather than climbing down, the kid burrowed in even deeper.
(Thank you for calling out to me earlier... And thank you for holding me right now, too. You're so kind and warm. It's amazing. I've never met anyone like you. It's like looking at an alien. Thank you so much. I feel like I'm dreaming.)
Haram kept whispering in English, one breathless sentence after another.
He was murmuring to himself even without any response from me, so it seemed he still wasn't entirely in his right mind.
'First things first — I need to calm him down.'
I thought about stroking his head like before, but that didn't work out either. I was still wearing the white wig from the shoot, and every time my hand moved, the wig tangled.
(Are you trying to pat my head? Should I take the wig off??)
The voice floating up from my chest was full of hope.
Sorry, but that's not happening.
"Then the stylist unnies would have to do all their work twice. Let's take the wig off after the shoot."
(...)
Even without seeing his face, I could tell Haram was disappointed. I soothed him by promising to pat his back instead.
'Raising a kid is really no joke.'
Watching Noh Bihyeok, I'd sometimes thought he was such a child, but seeing an actual child up close made the difference glaringly obvious.
So Bihyeok was the mature one, huh. I suddenly felt bad for all those times.
For a long while after that, I rubbed Han Haram's back while the kid nuzzled against me with little whimpering sounds. And I thought.
'How am I going to fix this?'
Having butted in like this, I had to see it through to the end. I couldn't just pat his back and call it a day — I needed to find an actual solution.
'For starters, his fundamentals are a mess.'
The acting I'd just witnessed from Han Haram was terrible. Nobody's skill magically improves from a few minutes of pointers — at best, he'd go from awful to passable...
'Still, passable beats terrible, doesn't it?'
After thinking it over, I spoke up.
"Haram."
"Am I heavy?? Should I move over?"
"No, you're fine. More importantly, I want to talk about your acting. Can I ask you a few things?"
Haram hesitated for a moment, then nodded. Worried he might shrink into himself, I phrased my question as gently as I could.
"Was anything difficult when you were practicing your acting?"
"Um... it wasn't really difficult, it's just... everything felt kind of like a blur."
Haram answered carefully, watching my face for a reaction.
(Honestly, I still don't understand the story. I don't get why the spirit reacts that way, and... the scenes talking with Kang Seok make especially no sense to me. I got the script yesterday and read it over and over again, but—)
"Hold on. You read the script yesterday?"
(...? Yeah.)
Are they kidding me?
I barely managed to smooth out my face before it could crumple.
'And that's why it was terrible.'
Handing a script to a kid with no prior acting experience the day before the shoot — how did that make any sense?
To be fair, Han Haram's part wasn't large. Once we finished filming the scene where the young spirit shows hostility toward the facility staff, the scene where he first meets Kang Seok, and the scene where he gradually lets his guard down around him, he was done.
And his lines came to all of two.
'You could just move over there.' and 'I'm not human.' That was the extent of it.
With almost no dialogue, it wasn't a technically demanding role.
Of course, that doesn't mean expression work is easy. But the gap in difficulty between acting with lines and acting without them is clear as day — the intensity of the words, the height of the tongue, the tremble in the voice, the parting of the lips. There's just that much less to worry about.
'But it's not a scene you throw a total beginner straight into, either.'
I wanted to peer inside the head of the woman called Han Haram's mother. How empty did it have to be to push a job through like this without a shred of forethought?
And it wasn't just that the shoot would suffer — the kid performing the role wouldn't enjoy a second of it either.
'Han Haram is the one getting stuck with the mess.'
I nearly clicked my tongue without thinking and barely caught myself, what with the child right there.
Anyway, now I knew why Han Haram's acting was so terrible. All that remained was finding a way to fix it.
'The one silver lining is that he isn't shy in front of the camera.'
Maybe because of his photoshoot experience, standing before the camera didn't seem to faze him at all. It was exactly as Haram had said — he simply hadn't understood the story at all.
'Of course not.'
When you don't understand why a character says or does something, you can't possibly know what expression to make.
'So what should I do...'
While I was racking my brain, there came a knock at the window.
"Actor-nim. They say the set is ready for you."
"Okay, I'm coming."
After answering Jinbae-hyung, I looked down at Han Haram, who had gone sullen again, and asked:
"Haram. Can you do something for me?"
"Huh?"
Facing that bewildered little face, I made up my mind. Don't worry. I'll fix this for you.
An Jinbae waited quietly for the car door to open.
With the staff watching, he kept his face blank, but inside, questions swarmed.
'Does the actor like children that much?'
Even after they'd started living together, the actor visited the orphanage about once a month. An Jinbae had tagged along, and had seen the actor smiling gently at the children more times than he could count.
But what he'd just witnessed was something new.
'Han Haram!'
The actor's face had carried an emotion so raw that anyone could have read it.
'Outright fury.'
That single feeling had filled the actor's face completely.
He briefly considered whether the two of them already knew each other, but that made no sense. He'd overheard the staff whispering — Han Haram's casting had only been finalized yesterday.
'Whoa, the PD's nephew? So the kid who was supposed to be cast just got straight-up dumped?'
'That's this industry for you. Though honestly, in terms of looks Han Haram's got the actor beat. He looks just like Lee Yeonjae.'
'So what good does that do? He can't act. Like, at all. Did you see Kang PD's face? He was livid.'
'Well, he asked for the kid himself, so what can he do. But yeah, the acting was truly something else. The face is good enough that I was hoping he'd be anything short of a disaster...'
Searching his own memory, An Jinbae could find no point where Han Haram and the actor could possibly have crossed paths.
'So today is the first time either of them has laid eyes on the other.'
And yet the way the actor looked at Han Haram ran far too deep for that.
An Jinbae tried building one theory after another, then shook his head.
'He isn't someone I could understand with easy reasoning like this.'
His own role was simple: help the actor live safely and act happily. If the actor cared for Han Haram, then all An Jinbae had to do was extend the same care in turn.
While he was arranging his thoughts like that, the two of them stepped out of the car.
"Hyung, thank you for waiting."
"Not at all. Actor Han, are you feeling better now?"
"Yees..."
Han Haram answered awkwardly — perhaps because of An Jinbae's sheer size.
Unlike on the way into the car, the boy was standing on his own two feet, so he seemed to have recovered considerably from earlier.
An Jinbae glanced at the actor, whose hand was wrapped tightly around one of Han Haram's.
"Hyung, there's something I'd like to ask the PD."
The actor requested a conversation with the PD. An Jinbae had expected as much, so the answer came easily.
"Yes. I mentioned it to him earlier. He's waiting by the trailer."
"Thank you."
The actor smiled up at him. In those black eyes was a trust that looked like a man regarding a dependable ally.
An Jinbae liked that immensely.
The actor exchanged a few words with the PD and returned to the set. The PD, coming back with him, bellowed at the staff:
"Alright, everyone listen up! Yeonjae's going to act out the scene so Haram can get a feel for it. We'll be using this for the behind-the-scenes footage later, so we're running recording and mic lines as if it were the real shoot. Let's move, people!"
Of course.
An Jinbae gave a small nod.
'What a genuinely kind person.'
Could anyone really be this gentle toward a total stranger they'd met only today?
He felt proud to serve someone so remarkable — and, at the same time, a quiet bitterness welled up inside him.
A person's kindness settles the people around them, and that warmth spreads outward like heat from a hearth. It was nothing short of a blessing to the world — but to give kindness away, one had to be ever mindful of others, to consider them constantly.
In other words, it meant carving flesh from one's own body to feed someone else. And yet...
'Actor-nim will manage it. I know he will.'
His actor would surely succeed. He was a wise man — sooner or later, he would find the way. He would find a way to be kind not only to others, but to himself as well.
And until that day came, all An Jinbae had to do was quietly fulfill the role he'd been given.
"Haram, just think of it like a photoshoot. The way you used to look at the reference and copy the pose — you watch my acting, and you do the exact same thing. Got it?"
The voice reaching him was gentle, but Han Haram was still afraid. So he spoke in a trembling, unsteady pitch.
"...Yeonjae. I don't have any confidence I'll do well. What do I do?"
After everything Yeonjae had done for him, the thought of ruining it made the world go dark before his eyes.
Getting scolded by his mother was the last thing on his mind. It was the future he dreaded — the future where he failed, and the other person looked at him with disappointment.
Because this kindness was the first he'd ever tasted, it felt all the more frightening — and all the more precious. Han Haram swallowed, his anxiety welling up in his throat, but the voice that came back was full of certainty.
"Then have some."
"..."
(I know it feels like a lot of pressure. But we're already here. And the fastest way out of that pressure you're feeling right now is to finish this shoot properly.)
Those seemingly indifferent black eyes met Han Haram's with softness.
(If the two of us do it together, we can do it. At least, that's what I think. What about you?)
(...)
(Can you do that for me?)
After a brief hesitation, Han Haram nodded.
(Yeah. I will. I'll try! I'll really try my best!)
It was a strange thing. The harder he nodded, the more words he pushed out, the more his confidence swelled inside him.
The man called Lee Yeonjae smiled at him kindly, then stepped onto the set to show him how it was done.
"Ready— action!"
And the instant the red light on the camera blinked on, Lee Yeonjae vanished.
There was acting that defied belief even when witnessed with one's own eyes, and with every take, Han Haram's own performance grew steadier and steadier.
It was only hours later that Han Haram learned the man he'd spent the entire day beside — Lee Yeonjae — was the youngest actor ever to win Best Leading Actor at the Cannes Film Festival.